Where the Light Breaks
by Bionically
Summary: The War was over, and things should have been better—but they weren't. Or maybe they could be. Repeated encounters with an old classmate puts old wounds into perspective. Dramione. EWE. Written for the 2019 Drizzle Fest.


**AN: **Much thanks to alphas/betas Maloreiy, an author I admire very much, and Mojojoiamhe, my forever after bff. The angsty bits would have far less weight without them. Thanks again.

Also, much gratitude to the mods, who make this fest almost completely stress-free with their awesome laidback ways.

This was written for the 2019 Drizzle Fest. The prompt was: "Maybe he was going crazy or it was the humidity in the air that made him think she looked beautiful."

* * *

There were times when Draco wondered if life would have been easier if he had been killed in the war.

Appearing in public now required nerves of steel. If he thought his final two years at Hogwarts were hellish, now he saw a similar future stretched out ahead of him. It didn't help his father had recently been on trial; sentencing would happen in the coming week. Because of that, public appearances were deemed politic, especially tonight, one year to the day of the last battle that had taken place at Hogwarts.

A commemorative event was to be held at the scene of the crime, now that Hogwarts was successfully rebuilt. Efforts toward its reconstruction had been made, in some small part, with Malfoy money. Draco resented it—it would have been far less hypocritical, he felt, if they had just come right out and fined them. Instead, the Ministry in all its infinite wisdom had asked for donations, by hinting at how the Malfoys would soon have to go without.

It was simultaneously blackmail and a threat, both to which Draco and his mother had caved. What could they do now but dance to the whims of the new Ministry?

Harry Potter would be speaking tonight, and their counsel had informed them of his intent to give due credit to Narcissa Malfoy. That was the reason they had come and not stayed locked up in their home, pretending that life went on as normal.

Draco would have much preferred not to be back in Hogwarts. This place was filled to the brim with his misdeeds and being here was suffocating. He wouldn't have put it past his mother to slip him a relaxation draught in his aperitif before they came. Unfortunately, if she had, she hadn't put a strong enough dosage and now he felt distinctly ill at ease. His shirt collar seemed hexed with a shrinking charm guaranteed to strangle him before the night was out.

He sat at the edge of the fray with his back to the wall, nursing what was probably his fourth—fifth?—glass of wine, wishing his mother weren't so consummate a politician that she felt inclined to speak with everyone in the room. He wished the night were already over. When he looked up at the sky, it was dark and he could make out a faint smattering of stars. Not a cloud in sight. If only there could be a giant storm that blew in right now, he could make his getaway.

Most of all, he wished that the wine weren't watered down and that he was drunker. He couldn't see the difference between being here and sitting in Azkaban—all the happiness was currently being sucked out of him by slapping him in the face with his worst decisions.

Failure upon failure, with only the briefest punctuation of success at actions that only led to what was now considered evil in the extreme. Or deluded, as he was lucky to have been labeled. Poor, deluded Draco bogged down with extortionate demands on his life, was how his lawyer was planning on spinning it. It was possibly how he would be seen for the rest of his life—either evil incarnate or the biggest simpleton to ever walk the Hogwarts grounds.

Here was where he tried to get glory by winning the House cup—and failed.

Here was the place he allowed rabid Death Eaters to enter to do their worst. Here was the place where he dueled with Harry Potter—and failed.

Here was the place where he plotted and planned to do just that, and failed.

Here was the place where he watched Professor Snape—a man he trusted beyond a shadow of a doubt to do the right thing—kill the headmaster.

Here was the place he watched as the Carrows tortured students as punishment.

Here was the place he watched his friend get swallowed by a great whorl of cursed fire.

There was a humming sound in his head at that very last thought. Images threatened to override his vision, only halting with the striking of the Hogwarts clock. Nine o'clock.

Draco made up his mind. He stood abruptly from the deserted table, with every intention of leaving this place. His mother would understand.

That was when he bumped into someone and splashed his drink all over their shirt and slacks. When Draco saw who it was, he could have cursed his luck through the seven seas, because of all people, he would have to run into Hermione Granger. Of course.

"Ergh," she said, looking every bit as put out as he was.

The funny thing about Draco's life was that nothing ever happened when it should have happened. This sort of thing would have been exceedingly amusing back before the Dark Lord began to live rent-free in his house. Now, after Hermione Granger was just hailed as the brains that saved Harry Potter at least seven times in the past, it was a sign of things to come.

"I beg your pardon," Draco said through stiff lips. This was horrible, horrible, horrible, and, cowardly though it might have been, he cast around for his mother to come save him.

Meanwhile, Granger seemed not to have even noticed who it was had done the bumping, or else she might have accused him of doing it on purpose. She was attempting to clean up her shirt with her wand and failing.

All Draco wanted to do was to exit this situation, so he coughed and said, "Maybe I can help?" It was a question on his end, because he didn't need his helpfulness to be misconstrued as intention to hex.

She shrugged. "Why not?"

He didn't think she had even registered to whom she was saying this, so he slowly said the charm and aimed his wand carefully toward her shirt, keeping wary eyes on her at all times.

"Thanks," she said, squinting down at herself in a way that would have been comical if Draco had been capable of humour at that moment. She then waved her wand a bit and he stepped backwards, thinking for just a moment that now he was going to get cursed.

"I was in a hurry and brought the wrong wand. And I couldn't Apparate from the premises, so—" Granger waved her wand around again and he weaved along with her motions, trying to keep clear of the tip.

Then he recognised the wand. "Isn't that—" He didn't even finish. It was. It definitely was Bellatrix's wand.

"Yeah," she said with a sigh, rotating it a little in her hand in a way that was just a bit too careless. In fact, now that he thought about it, she looked distinctly tottered. As the thought crossed his mind, she stumbled to the other foot as though she had fallen asleep standing up.

"Are—are you alright?" Draco looked around the room and back to her uneasily. The last thing he needed was for her to fall on him. Then he would be dead. Hexed to death by her friends and a litany of bad spells. He looked around for red hair.

She waved a hand. "Oh, fine, fine. I've just helped win the war, so everything's just brilliant, isn't it? Except my personal life's now on the blitz." She peered at him a bit. "Malfoy, is that you? I thought you were Luna."

"Except we look nothing alike and I'm about five feet taller than her. Either your eyesight has gone or I've reached new lows if I'm being mistaken for a woman." He was caught off guard enough that he resorted to sarcasm.

"The hair's kind of similar," she said, unblinking eyes now staring at him with an intensity that made him try to duck away.

"I'm pretty sure I know my own family tree and we're not related."

"It's probably been tampered with," she said before she started scrubbing at her eyes. Before he could do more than stare at her with unusually gape-jawed idiocy, she burst into tears.

He stared at her in horror, feet fixed to the ground when he should have been sprinting away. He wasn't quite sure what he had done this time—surely he had done much worse in the past and she had merely tossed her hair and narrowed her eyes at him as though he were a slug too low to engage.

To give her credit, she recovered fairly quickly. She took one long sniff and placed a hand on her chest, shaking her head all at the same time. "No, it's—nothing to do with you. I have—other things on my mind, that's all."

"Right. Alright." He was just muttering words that he thought she liked to hear now as he thought at a furious pace just what he said to make her go off like that. He was fairly sure he hadn't used any unpleasant appellations toward her.

She sniffed and looked at him with red but mercifully dry eyes. "All you blondes look the same to me anyway."

Somehow Draco had the feeling this wasn't about his hair colour anymore, but he had no idea what that something was. At least she wasn't making those horrifying gasping cries now. "I mean, if you go back far enough, maybe all blondes are related."

That, apparently, was something to set her over the edge. She made a pathetic hiccoughing sound that had him reach out one awkward hand.

She held him off as she started to talk as though he weren't even there. "It's not as though I don't have it all under control," she seemed to be muttering in between furiously scrubbing her eyes. "And it's not like I don't still have parents somewhere. A lot of people are a lot worse off than I am—argh! What did they put in this wine!" she yelled suddenly, making him jump.

He had no idea what she had been about to do next, but when she pointed the wand at her dripping nose, he leaped forward and knocked the wand away from her. He heard the distant clatter as it fell to the ground, and then both of them dropped down to look for it.

"Why'd you do that?" she asked him over her shoulder, now awkwardly on all fours. She lifted one arm and furiously scrubbed at her face with her sleeve.

He opened his mouth to say something, and then shut it. Instead, he pulled out a handkerchief, shook it out and leaned down to hand it to her. The effort of speaking to her and the ensuing acrobatics made him dizzy and he decided that—as crazy as the bane of his life was behaving, he might as well have a rest right here on the floor against the wall. He angled his knees up in front of him.

"Thanks," she said, pulling herself up to rest on her haunches. She apparently had no idea how to wipe her face gracefully. Instead, all he could say was that she used his handkerchief thoroughly.

There was a burst of laughter somewhere on the other end of the hall and suddenly the lights from that direction extinguished. Any second now, they would be in the center of attention. Where once he had yearned to be adulated by all, Draco now just wanted to hide away in the manor, free to languish unknown for all of perpetuity. Instead, he was secluded behind this empty table, with someone with whom he'd had varying degrees of intense enmity over the years.

He wondered why she was crying when the rest of her clan were celebrating—they'd won, hadn't they? They weren't the ones who had most of their relatives killed and imprisoned and their house gutted like meat for the frying pit. His first instinct on seeing her had been to avoid her and any possible gloating words she'd cast at him. Or worse, words of pity.

Bugger. He couldn't think of a worse reaction from her.

A bemused expression crossed her face. "I was about to do something," she said with a confused frown. "But I've forgotten what it was." Instead of peering around, both her hands were on her thighs as though in meditation and she was staring blankly into space.

She was drunker than how his head felt, and it felt like it was floating about six feet from the top of his neck. Using his wand, he pointed in the direction her wand had rolled. "Your wand."

It should have been funny that a drunk Hermione Granger was so slow-moving, when the real one would have stomped over his hand to retrieve anything that she had dropped. The wand had rolled under one of the chairs on the other side of the table. After a moment of watching as Granger ducked unathletically to avoid banging her head on the rungs of the chairs—was she trying to crawl under them?—and failing, he summoned the wand into his hand and held it gingerly out in front of him. "Here," he said. "You shouldn't be using this anyway. You should—"

Her hand was outstretched and her shirt sleeve had pulled up along her arm, revealing a reddened scar on the inside of her wrist. His eyes flickered over the mark and he dropped the wand.

Images danced on the inside of his eyelids.

Mudblood, I'll make you talk, his aunt had screeched and he had stood there, feet frozen. In that instant, on the floor of his drawing room where he used to play with his toys, Granger's eyes had flown to his in an unconscious search of reassurance before she was pinned to the ground. Screams were ripped from the back of her throat; incoherent, high-pitched sounds that were a mixture of crying and begging—the type that no one in their right mind could ignore or refuse. Draco himself had been on the verge of begging his own aunt to make it stop.

Bellatrix hadn't been sane, though he hadn't realised the extent of it until that moment.

He hadn't interfered, and his father had later congratulated him on his spine of steel.

Some compliment.

Of the two ot them that day, Draco would wager he had been more terrified. He had been terrified he would be ordered to kill her. Every time he thought things couldn't get any worse, they did.

Hermione Granger had barely been able to stand when Weasley and Potter escaped with her. Draco had seen the Carrows torture kids, but in a teasing sort of way, lazily, to demonstrate how it should be done. It hadn't been executed with such maddened relentlessness, punishing everything that this girl was and wasn't, in order to scar her for life in a way that took viciousness to a new level.

Seeing someone tortured before they were killed was just about the most excruciating thing Draco could think of. He had barely been able to stop himself from throwing up. Some spine of steel. He wanted to scream at her to run, you stupid Mudblood, why are you still here?

Draco could hardly breathe now, seeing that marred flesh on her arm. The inscription looked burnt, and suddenly that description took him back to the Room of Requirement, where he had seen the look on Crabbe's face as he fell. Surprise mixed with anxiety, then dominated by terror as he lost his balance. The fire had curled hungrily around Crabbe's body, eager to consume him, tendrils of flame incinerating his skin even before he had fallen from view. That view was a common recurring nightmare for him whenever he had had a particularly bad day.

That fate would have been his, if this girl and her friends hadn't circled back for him. They didn't have to; he certainly never did likewise for them.

Even if he'd wanted to, he couldn't have.

He'd failed at most things in his life, he now realised, and the worst failure had resulted in the death of Crabbe. Stupid, foolish, loyal Crabbe. Screaming, burning Crabbe—

no, Crabbe, don't let go—CRABBE—

"Malfoy. Malfoy!"

He realised with a start where he was, crouched down near a wall in the Great Hall at Hogwarts, hidden by a round table set out for the memorial speeches. The sound of screaming—always Crabbe's screaming—gradually faded away as he blinked his eyes and unclenched his jaw where it had been grinding down so hard even his neck was tense.

He wasn't inside the Room of Requirement. He wasn't even in the Manor. This wasn't his Hogwarts years; it was another day.

He slowly took his hands down from the sides of his face and noticed there was a hand attached to his sleeve; it belonged to Granger. Yes, she was there too. It wasn't a snake this time. His breathing slowed and he fell backwards to sit against the wall, unclenching his jaw from its closed and locked position.

She stared at him with wide eyes and held her hands aloft, as though talking to a wild animal. "It's okay," she said in a soothing tone. "It's okay."

He rubbed one cheek against his shoulder and found that his eyes felt gritty, stinging. How humiliating. If only he had left an hour earlier, none of this would have occurred and he would still have his dignity.

"Here," she said, her face all scrunched up as though she were trying desperately not to cry alongside him. She held out his handkerchief, which fell cleanly into neat lines—she had cleaned it. He didn't take it back. Any overt movements and he'd shatter. Just break apart into little pieces, hopefully so fine that nobody would ever know he had been there.

Eventually, he had to look up. Thankfully, she had the sensitivity to be looking anywhere but at him although she hadn't had the tact to take herself off. She did manage to make him laugh when he saw that she was using the tablecloth to blow her nose.

"Keep the handkerchief," he said finally. "You look like you need one."

"It's supposed to be a happy day—you know?" she said, looking at him as though it were natural for her to look at him for reassurance. "But when they started talking about all the people who've—" She couldn't finish her thought, and her knuckles turned white as her grip on the tablecloth tightened.

"I didn't think I'd still be alive," he found himself saying. A moment later, when she blinked at him, eyes sharpening for a moment, he deeply regretted his words.

But instead of asking questions, she nodded. "Me neither," she said and lapsed into silence.

Once he thought she had a monopoly on questions, as though she earned a Galleon for every question mark she sent into the world. Right now, she looked fragile enough to break, eyes red and brimming with unshed tears and a quivering mouth. He had never seen her look less than confident, but now any pretensions at happiness was gone.

Survivor's Remorse, they had called it earlier in the evening, and he had almost snorted at the incongruity of such a thing. Yet, without her coming to cry in his corner, he wouldn't have understood such a phrase. They were both marked-up individuals; he out of some mistaken past ideas of fame and glory and she out of excessive loyalty to her friends. Which of them was the bigger fool? He didn't know, but somehow he wondered if it wasn't him.

They sat there for a moment that felt like anywhere from five minutes to half an hour. It was a strange intimacy being there, shielded by the table with only the partygoers' feet walking about them to disturb their momentary isolation. It was as peaceful and quiet as was possible to find in the midst of flashing lights and determined frivolity swirling overhead.

He broke it by rising quickly to his feet. Too quickly. He had to brace himself on the back of a chair to steady himself, only faintly aware of her slowly getting up a few feet away. Perhaps she wasn't the drunk one, but him. "I'm sorry," he said, the words coming out abruptly and without clarity. For what was he apologising? He couldn't say, but possibly for too many things to catalogue. He thrust Aunt Bella's wand at her, which she took after a moment's hesitation. "Get rid of it. That wand. It's—it's evil."

She turned the wand over in her hand before looking back at him. "It's just a wand."

"It's a magical artifact, capable of storing trapped magic. She—You should get rid of it."

She nodded slowly. "Okay. I will." She opened her mouth to say something more, but nothing came out and he turned away, raking his hair back with shaky fingers. He was never coming back here again.

"We all have bad dreams... you know?" she said suddenly, and he looked back at her. Her eyes were locked on his face with that single-minded intensity that he always equated with her swottiness.

Time and again, he had made fun of her dedication to schoolwork, trying to mask his annoyance at always coming second. There had never been any denying her intelligence and there was no denying it now. She had seen more than he had meant to reveal and she knew now that his insides were scrambled and in turmoil and had been for awhile now.

Time was when he would have rejected her overtures and said something rude in passing. Now, he lifted his lashes to stare at her, for the first time really seeing her. He had seen her full of herself, self-righteous, haughty, maybe even pretty that one time, and he'd seen her crying and begging, which was more horrible than he'd thought possible. Worried and compassionate for him, never. Her eyes were slightly red and her hair was starting to pull free from the clip on the side of her head. Her lips were slightly pinched from her early teary outburst and her freckles stood out in stark contrast against her white face. She was looking far from her best, but the sympathy was unmistakable in her eyes and made her look like the best friend he never realised he needed.

"It'll get better," she said and he latched onto her words like it was a personal promise. It never occurred to him to scoff at that, at what was a rote phrase, useless as prophecy.

She had always known the answers to everything; there was no reason for him to start disbelieving her now.

* * *

Some days were better than other days.

Some days, Draco and his mother made a decent showing of living a normal life.

Other days, they were stuck in the endless loop of cleanup.

House-elves could only do so much when it came to magical relics. Some of the visitors during the War had left indelible traces in their home. Dark magic, for example, had to be dismantled in tandem. Cleanup for the Manor was painstaking and torturous. There was Dark magic throughout the Manor, and even more disturbing, bloody imprints that could only be removed by hand.

By far the worst, though, was the legal case of Lucius Malfoy.

The Ministry made it very clear that a defense of the Imperius curse a third time wasn't good enough, especially not when he already had a prior sentence. Father and son's testimony on behalf of one another was also not enough to overturn a ruling of conspiracy and at least five other counts. There were simply too many charges. The fact that Lucius had been the head of the Malfoy family when Voldemort returned and given aid and shelter to him was fairly damning, even despite the fact that his wand had been usurped by then.

Mostly, though, it was because there was a need to point fingers and apportion blame.

There were endless days when Draco and his mother sat and spoke with the lawyer for the defense. Those days made Draco want to scream with the helplessness of it all. Those days were filled with legalese; endless discussion of rules and possible loopholes, none of which applied to them.

Then, there were the days they sat with Lucius Malfoy, who sat in Azkaban to await his trial.

He had been a ruined man the first time he came back. Draco had never seen his father other than perfectly tailored and coiffed, back so straight he could be the standard for rulers. This time, he seemed worse than before.

Initially, they thought Lucius had managed to avoid most of the fighting at Hogwarts, but he had gotten struck, most notably when he shielded Draco. Self-defense wasn't a strong enough defense when going up against ex post facto laws.

Now, Lucius planned on entering a plea bargain so that Draco and Narcissa remained free of any charges. In so doing, his sentence was decreased from two lifetimes to fifty years in maximum security; in the deepest, dankest part of Azkaban. No parole. Draco and Narcissa would go free.

It was a terrible bargain. Draco was certain that the Ministry was bluffing. Weren't they? His father still knew people; had friends…none of whom were appearing out of the woodwork. The lawyer had made it seem as though Narcissa would be charged next, for aiding and abetting prison escapees. Yes, Harry Potter could be called as their witness, but one testimony was not going to be enough.

They took the deal, and Draco went home and stayed drunk for an entire week.

* * *

Eventually, Draco had to leave the Manor.

The strange thing was that he couldn't get comfortable in the place that had been his home for the past two decades. Paintings reflected the dark mood of the inhabitants and stayed uncommonly somber and still, with a shadowy sheen that looked eerie even in daylight. Every faint rustling made him look around for a giant snake that wasn't there. Arguments between the portraits made him duck his head in fear of a stray hex from behind.

None of these things were going to happen again, and yet sometimes those days felt more real than his present life. He had looked the Dark Lord straight in his dead eyes. Some part of Draco feared that he would rise again. They had assumed he was gone before, but he hadn't been the first time. Why did everyone assume that one young boy could make the world's worst nightmare go away?

In part, that was why, as angry as Draco was about his father's sentence, the punishment made sense to him. They hadn't been harsh on Death Eaters in the past and the world had suffered for it. Lesson learned; lenience and tolerance weren't happening again.

Understanding that didn't make him feel any less dead, any less angry, or any less guilty or wrongfully used.

Such feelings, combined with a good amount of alcohol late at night made him think of Hermione Granger and that conversation they had a year or so ago.

She had cried—why? She had bad dreams—what about? She felt guilty—about what?

If he had had other close friends who were still in the tense atmosphere of England, perhaps he wouldn't have felt so isolated. But letters came for him infrequently, and when they did, they had invariably been opened prior to his receiving it, by Ministry officials keeping them under surveillance.

So he would replay that last conversation he shared with Granger, where she had tried to comfort him instead of mock him.

He would be struck by the irony of the situation, that she should be the one to comfort him, when centuries of social superiority had decreed her as being a lesser person. The strange fact of her reaching out to comfort her former tormentor was also not lost on him.

At times, he would consider the alternate notion of Hermione Granger being his friend instead of Harry Potter's—if fate had twisted around in some strange fashion so that he wasn't born in this travesty of a family and she was just another loyal friend willing to stick by through the hairier events in his life.

There was no point in taking that stream of thought any further, though, since no one could ever know what would have happened in a different life.

* * *

It was at the Ministry when he saw her again.

Draco paused at the bulletin board next to the lifts, letting the throng of people flow around him. He kept his head down so that he didn't have to look anyone in the eye.

His father had been released from Azkaban for bad health and sent to St. Mungo's. Draco met with the family lawyer regarding a petition to keep Lucius Malfoy in a locked ward at St. Mungo's, which was infinitely preferable to being returned to Azkaban as soon as treatment was over. Draco was currently on his way to speak to someone in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to see how the petition was faring when he was waylaid by an eye-catching sign.

The Second of May, the bulletin announced. Remember Our Past. Rebuilding Continues. Hope for the Future.

He turned his face away. The last thing he wanted to do was to remember his past.

"It's not really grammatical, is it," a voice below him said.

Draco started and stopped when he met the face of Hermione Granger.

She was looking smaller than he remembered her, or perhaps he had grown, despite his steady alcohol-based diet. Unlike him, she didn't have dark circles under her eyes. She was skinnier, like he was, without the pudge of youth on her cheeks. She looked much too young to be wearing Ministry robes, and yet she undoubtedly was.

Her face was turned to the bulletin so that her profile was presented to him. She looked inoffensive and feminine and he suddenly saw her as though he had never known her before.

His fingers twitched at his side. He stopped them from reaching into his robes for his flask.

"They're not really sure what to call it," she said, gesturing at the bulletin. "Memorial Day was good enough last year, but now they want to call it something else."

A lifetime of quippy taunts, and now Draco wasn't sure what to say. He turned his face away. There was no reason for her to know how often he thought of her, how that one moment with her crouched down on the floor seemed more real to him than any of his daily activities. Of course, his daily activities didn't comprise more than ordering the house-elves in the reconstruction of the Manor or moping over his father's health.

"I'm the prisoner liaison for your father's case," she said, after a long moment in which silence reigned. "Do you want to come with me? Let's talk in my office."

He followed her then, without question.

Her office was a small square lit up with lights and framed by bookshelves on all sides. There was only one shelf on the bookshelves dedicated to photographs and cards, and they sat in the rectangle like spectators at the theatre. He wasn't able to spare them more than a glance before he met her steady gaze. She stood behind her desk with one hand outstretched, motioning him to a chair.

"You're probably wondering why I'm the liaison for your father's case." She waited until he moved into the seat before sitting down behind her desk.

Draco cleared his throat when it seemed that otherwise she wouldn't continue. "I am a bit taken aback, yes."

"I was first on the Committee to Oversee Sentient Beast Prisoners, but now it's been integrated with Death Eater Prisoners." She, too, cleared her throat and pointed at a recording device on her table. "This is just formality since this is just a preliminary meeting, but this conversation will be recorded. Will you be okay with this?"

She waited for his response as though he actually had a choice. He gave a short nod, his jaw tight. His collar suddenly felt unbearably tight; the room unseasonably stuffy. How did people stay in this dank mausoleum of a place day in and day out for years on end? He felt entombed already. His hands tightened on the armrest; an action he was sure her sharp eyes didn't miss. He longed for a drink.

"It's...really for your protection," she said, her voice gentler. Her fingers hovered over the recorder before curling under, leaving the recorder untouched. Her nails were short and clipped, with ink splotches on her right hand. It was a working hand, despite how slim and fragile it looked. "There is some negativity against the—prisoners and I brought this up as a safety measure and it's just been adopted."

She meant Death Eaters, although she wasn't explicitly stating it. Word was that Goyle's father had been questioned so harshly that he still hadn't regained the use of walking without an Imperio. There was no proof that the Ministry was behind it, only speculation hushed up with oh, but he was only a Death Eater and he deserved all that he got .

Draco thought of his father again, and how Lucius's physical downturn had been so obvious after his trial. His imagination was rapidly filling in the blanks for him. One part of him was logically processing that Hermione Granger was trying to help him, but the other, louder parts were angry at her, at the system, at life.

Things were spiralling out of control in his life, and really all he needed was for one thing to remain constant. Already, they were being hit with so many charges that there were three Magical Defense Counsel retained on their behalf. All this that Draco still had left to lose was part of the reason that Lucius had taken the plea bargain. The Malfoy patriarch was betting on there still being a legacy—greatly diminished by now—to be managed by the last male heir.

It suddenly felt like this simple talk with the prison liaison was just another method in the long list of ways of law-abiding, good people who wanted to see the Malfoys go down in flames, in this life or the next.

His knuckles were white on the armrest of his chair, and then suddenly he couldn't help it. He reached one shaking hand inside his robe and took out a silver flask from within.

It probably looked terrible, and he shouldn't have done it; not in front of his father's prisoner liaison. Almost at once, Draco fumbled to stuff it back into the pocket from which it came. Barty Crouch, Jr., that madman, had constantly been drinking from a hip flask and nobody had thought to question him when he had been a Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.

They wouldn't make that mistake today.

Draco was almost afraid to look up at Granger after that slip-up. He stood abruptly from the chair instead, drying to disguise his movements by rustling his robes. The chair scraped loudly against the floor in the small room.

"I'll come back some other time," he said. His voice was louder and more scratchy than his chair had been, and his fingers were tapping a rapid, uncontrollable tattoo against the side of his legs.

In his periphery, he was aware she stood as well. "Anytime you're ready," she said. She didn't move from behind her desk.

His eyes lifted from her hand where it rested on top of the still recorder to her face. Their eyes locked. There was a steadiness in her gaze as she stared back at him, as though she saw him for something other than the Death Eater who got off too lightly. There was no mockery, no pity in her eyes, just steadiness.

Possibly there would never be any pity from her for him. She had seen him at his absolute worst; been there as damning witness to the most shameful moments of his life. This calm acceptance, however, surprised him. By rights, she should be shouting with glee by now, by how low he had fallen. Draco read the papers—or had, until the negativity towards his family had gotten too much for him. Given their history, he wouldn't have blamed her in the slightest.

Perhaps she had always been the better person. Perhaps she knew a little of what it was like to be shunned.

A startling sense of shame made him drop his gaze first and turn away. His hand was on the doorknob when she spoke again.

"I take too much Dreamless Sleep," she said from behind him.

His hand tightened on the doorknob, but he didn't turn.

"Harry binge-eats. George smokes. Ron—" There was a rustling sound of papers being shifted and then she cleared her throat. "The war changed all of us in different ways. You're not alone."

It was an opening, he realised. She was sharing things about herself, about her friends that she didn't need to. He slowly let go of the doorknob and turned.

"Does Ron drink?" he asked, the words dragged reluctantly and desperately out of him.

She shook her head silently. Her mouth formed a soundless no.

"I do," he said. Strangely, after saying that, his hands no longer twitched with the need to feel the coolness of his flask.

She nodded. Her eyes were steady on his, open. He could see everything she was feeling in them—sadness, loneliness, compassion. "We all have to cope somehow."

He took a deep breath and moved back into the room. After another second, he sat down gingerly in the chair he had so abruptly vacated.

His chest suddenly felt less constricted.

For the first time since he set foot in the Ministry that day, he felt he could breathe again.

* * *

The family lawyer suggested they volunteer the Manor as the venue of the annual celebration, as Hogwarts would be unavailable given that regular classes had started. It would be "good" for the family image, especially as Lucius was still kept at St. Mungo's and awaiting the decision on his petition. Whether or not it was approved would be irrelevant, the lawyer emphasised—what mattered was the image of the repentant Malfoy family intent on being rehabilitated into this new and open society.

Before the petition had made its way through the committee, the Manor was voted on and decided upon as the location of the Second Annual Memorial Day Celebration. It was then Draco realised the real reason their very political offer had been accepted so readily—it was an easy way for the new Ministry to gain entry to his home without the pains of a trial and summons.

Draco and his mother watched as Ministry personnel trooped through the Manor in the weeks that followed. There was nothing that they'd find. Draco and his mother had held hands in the aftermath of the battle and on the eve of his father's arrest and trial, burning or vanishing everything into the Chamber-That-Wasn't for items that would have cast the family in a bad light.

In the third week, Hermione Granger appeared. A heavy fog had rolled in outside and the Manor seemed preternaturally enveloped in the mist. At some point before arriving, she had been outside. Her hair bore droplets of water and her hair also had expanded with the increase of humidity.

He was so conscious of her presence that it made his spine itch.

Such was her expression when her eyes landed on him as she stepped out of the Floo. It was guarded, but also tentative and expectant—not in the way of Aurors as they had first examined the place for unsafe Dark Magic, but as someone who was seeing a long-lost relative years later.

"Granger," he said, greeting her with a polite nod. "You'll be wanting to speak to my mother."

"Er, yes," she said, her eyes then leaving him to dart about the place.

A portrait behind him yelled out a profanity at her presence and she jumped. Draco strode over and untied the cloth so that the portrait was covered up, all to the chorus of more profanities.

"Thank you," she said, seeming both awkward and tense. Her hands flexed at her sides. She appeared much less certain than she had always looked; more like that moment under the table a year ago. "She's not here?"

"She'll be down in a bit."

It wasn't until Parvati Patil stepped out of the Floo that Granger visibly relaxed and went to join her coworker. They stood together and talked until his mother came down to speak to them and led them off on a tour of the suitable rooms.

Granger was alone when she returned to the drawing room after an hour. He stood up as she entered.

He hadn't meant to wait for her; only he had just realised that this room was where it has all played out for her—Bellatrix's craziness interspersed with Greyback's rabid desire for fresh meat. She had been excruciatingly close to death here, and he had done nothing about it then.

He could do something about it now.

"You don't have to use the Floo in this room from now on," he said, his words coming out stilted and uncomfortable. Gallantry did not come easily to him; not like how it had with his father. "I've applied to have it switched to one of the other rooms."

Her gaze fell on him then, surprised at first, and then with a sort of bemused gratification. "Thank you," she said. "That means a lot to me. But it's really okay."

There was a beat in which no one spoke. Even the portraits were silent.

It was only later that he realised that something had changed between them; nothing was as it was between them anymore and it never would be again. He wasn't actively gunning for her to feel like an outcast, and she didn't go out of her way to make him feel intellectually inferior. They weren't two people on inevitably opposing sides, doomed to hate the other. Perhaps, once upon a time, that would have been their fate, but now it wasn't.

Those were memories of a lifetime ago, before war had happened to them. It had been a terrible war, but for the first time, Draco realised that it wasn't all bad. He never would have had the opportunity to see Hermione Granger in a different light; he never would have been forced to make decisions no boy of sixteen ought to make. Life was forever changed because of that strange turn of events.

It should have been this simple a decade ago, before school politics got to them, before customs and beliefs long before their existence took ahold of them and pried them apart.

Maybe they could have even been friends.

As he stood there, waiting with her for Parvati to return from wherever she went, there was something almost magical to the atmosphere, a type of magic that went beyond wandwork and spells.

Something as basic as two people meeting eyes at the same time for the first time.

As though all things could be possible, if two school rivals, a former Death Eater full of regrets and a tagged and tattooed Muggleborn witch, could stand together in friendly silence in the room where all sorts of atrocities had happened and set free all the prejudices and opinions they had about the other.

* * *

Life returned to normal after Memorial Day and the difference was almost stifling. His father's petition had been granted and he was now kept in the prisoner's ward at St. Mungo's. It wasn't freedom, but it was a far cry from Azkaban. Lucius Malfoy could have run abroad after the last battle, but staying and paying his dues had meant a lessening of the penalties on Draco. When Draco went to visit his father, it was with a heavy heart and a stomach full of guilt.

What did it mean to be a good father? Draco had always thought his father was the best of fathers—the one who stood a head taller than all others, who outranked everyone in status and money, who knew everyone there was to know. His father had been a man of extremes—punishment was dealt out with physical blows, but rewards had been swift and sweet. There had been no stinginess with Draco when it came to sweets or toys. His father was someone who stood for the term all in, although most people considered his loyalties fleeting and capable of being bought.

Lucius believed with all his heart the things he had been taught, following without a thought when his sister-in-law introduced him to the man who would own him. In hindsight, Draco thought as he gazed down at the greying face of his father, Lucius hadn't been very clever at all. A clever man followed his own path, not just where power led, or where empty promises beckoned.

In retrospect, ambition for worldly riches or an ephemeral concept such as power didn't seem clever in the least, which was something that Draco pondered about for quite some time at night.

That made him sadder than he could have possibly predicted. Some part of him wanted to believe, even after the fiasco of the past few years, that once his father had returned home, that all would be as it were. It didn't take Draco seeing his father's bowed figure and greying face to know that some things were changed forever.

Two months later, Draco received an owl from Hermione Granger: Draco, There are some things I would like to discuss with you in private. Would it be convenient for you to meet to talk? Thank you in advance for your response. H. Granger.

His first read elicited a slight lightening of his stomach, if only because here was something out of the blue. It was unpredicted and thus meant a change from his daily routine. His second and third reading parsed no extra information from the note, not even whether the meeting would be in connection to his father's case or something personal.

What he was feeling was only because of the strange sense of camaraderie that he started to feel with her, and because England was experiencing a dearth of Purebloods at the moment. All of his friends who hadn't been smeared with bad repute at the end of the war had left for warmer political climes.

After a few more owls, they settled on the Manor as a meeting place. Draco wondered at Hermione's bravery in returning to the scene of the crime. She had been there two months ago at the Memorial Day Celebration, resplendent this year in deep red dress robes that made her look sultry and foreign.

It had struck him then that he had seen this girl grow up right under his nose. He had been there to see her as a small girl with awkward, coltish limbs and giant frizzy hair. He had been oblivious to her transformation along the way into someone who was, if not a conventional beauty, fairly close to being a show-stopper.

Not for the first time, he considered that if he had met her now, with the understanding of the world as he did, he would have wanted more than just friendship from her.

"Hi," Hermione said. She sounded breathless and her hands went up to pat her hair. Her eyes came up to meet his in that searching way she had. "Thanks for meeting with me. And for, um, changing the Floo."

They were standing in the Long Gallery, which had been closed off to Ministry visitors in the past. The Malfoys had in keeping various items that the Ministry had long since frowned upon, either because of its Dark nature or its rarity and value. Now, though, many of those items had been taken away. There was no longer any reason for this room to stay locked up.

Her eyes flicked here and there through the room. "It's like a street," she said, giving a little laugh. "I wouldn't even be able to see you from the other end."

When he looked down this shadowed chamber, he saw a different era. It didn't sadden him now as much as the first time he had set foot in here a year ago. "I used to fly in here when the weather was poor," Draco said, and as though on cue, the wind gave a low moan outside the windows. Earlier, the sky had bore a pinkish hue, but now the sun had disappeared and the room darkened as well. They seemed secluded in their own little world.

"It's lovely," she said, and this time he noticed that her eyes went again to the bookshelves before she dragged them back to his face. "Can we—should we sit here?"

There were chairs placed at regular intervals all along the long, rectangular room. Draco moved in the direction she indicated, which was directly beside the fireplace opposite the long wall of windows. He pulled on a bell-rope hanging down on the wall. "Some refreshments," he said to her look of inquiry.

"Ah," she said. "You…have house-elves." She nodded and rubbed her palms against her thighs.

"Is that a problem?" he asked.

Hermione looked down at the table and seemed to be reviewing something in her mind. Then she looked up and said, "No, I really wanted to speak to you about something else. That is, regarding the current amendments up for a vote in the Hogwarts board of governors."

"Right." He nodded, bringing up in his mind the parcel of scrolls delivered to him last week. "Which one?"

"It's the—regulation for the background bars to entrance at Hogwarts. As the regulation stands now, shapeshifters—such as werewolves, selkie, veela, vampires, even wyvern, although that's quite rare—are all denied entrance."

Draco didn't let his expression change. His mind was in a whirl. He knew why she would want the law to change. Everyone knew just how close she had been to Professor Lupin and the furor that erupted after his status came out. Knowing Fenrir Greyback as he had, Draco didn't much relish the thought of such people in school with them.

Aloud, he said, "It's for safety reasons, you know."

There was a tone of regret in his voice. After the kindness she had shown him, repayment would have been a fine thing, had he the influence.

"It's segregation," she said, looking at him with pleading eyes. "They're just children. It would be better if all sentient magical beings were integrated and learned to live together."

"Hogwarts has never allowed non-wizards or witches entrance. At least half-blooded ancestry, I believe is how the regulation stands now."

She nodded at a furious rate. "Yes, but it's prejudice! I mean, even harmless sentient beings such as house-elves."

"Putting aside the educational habits of house-elves for the moment, what exactly do you expect me to do?" he asked.

She swallowed and pulled out a parchment from her bag. It was creased and the top ran a heading: Proposal for the Desegregation of Magical Education. "It's a huge school. It's wasted housing only a few wizards per year. Other Sentient Beings would be allowed in with overt acknowledgement of their status to prevent a furor. Other steps can be taken to ensure better integration and safety, such as separate quarters, additional classes, etc. The lake can house selkies and part of the forest not under the domain of the centaurs could be granted to other shapeshifters. But we can always add those addendum later."

He was shaking his head even before she finished speaking. The words came tumbling out of his mouth before he had a chance to stop it, or to reword it in a gentler fashion. "It's not going to pass, you know. It resurrects every few decades and it's never passed."

"But if—if the younger people put their support behind it."

He paused for a long moment before he admitted the truth. "I can't vote for that, you know? I'm legally obligated to vote how my father would have voted, given that he's incapacitated to vote, but he hasn't been removed from his position."

She bit her bottom lip and nodded. She looked downcast.

Draco looked away to avoid seeing her disappointment. As eager as he had been to see her, now he wished she hadn't come.

"How is he?" she asked.

That was an even worse subject for him. "Not well," he said and then abruptly changed the subject. "If I could, I'd change some regulations of my own."

He hadn't meant to say anything. He had only wanted her to not talk about his father, whose ailing health could, at times, make him tear up. His change of subject worked all too well; she tilted her head to the side and frowned in thought. "Which ones?"

"It's nothing."

There was the sound of tapping and they both looked up at the same time in the direction of the sound. "It's starting to rain," she said.

She gazed out of the windows for a long moment, while he looked at her instead. Time had softened some of her ways, blunted her previously razor-sharp edges. She had matured better than he had; became softer and more feminine.

"Is it time to get out your broom?" she asked, turning back to him. Her lips were eased up into a smile that crinkled up her eyes and brought out a hint of a dimple in her cheek.

She had never smiled at him before. He had seen her smile and laugh, but it had never been in connection to anything he said or did. Now they were adults and behaving civilly, discussing Hogwarts policies as though they hadn't grown up on opposing sides. She was even smiling at him for all as though they could have been having a late afternoon tea together, for no other reason than just getting together for a chat. Something in his chest tightened and hitched.

"Fancy a quick game of Quidditch? I'll lend you a broom," he said.

She laughed out loud and at that the tightening in his chest increased. "No, thanks. I think I'll pass."

"Not even for my vote?"

"You can't, remember?" she said, looking down at her parchments for a moment and letting out a long sigh before shuffling the papers together. "What would you want to change about the current policies?" The question seemed to be a change of subject to take her mind off her disappointment.

He shrugged. "Sorting practices?" He looked away from her intent gaze. "It's not going to be abolished either, but maybe if it were…"

He didn't want to say anything more, because he had a feeling she saw quite a lot from very little.

She nodded slowly. "None of the other schools use sorting for their students. And it has a tendency to split the school into factions."

"All in the name of friendly competition," he said, trying to keep the bitterness out of his tone and not succeeding completely.

"It's a good idea, Malfoy. I don't think the school rivalry was what the original Founders intended."

It wasn't just her appearance, he realised. She had honestly changed. They both had. Time had gentled her, softened the impatience that was always so central to her personality, curbed her tendency for exactness though she had lost none of her zeal. She was genuinely lovely now.

It was that or the humidity in the room that was making him fuzzy around the edges, because when he looked at her, he saw someone who was beautiful, in a way that went beyond mere appearances or ability. The room seemed much less dark with her presence in it.

When their refreshments appeared, Draco couldn't eat a bite. He didn't know when it had last felt so good to see someone. He felt almost hopeful, in a way that he hadn't felt since he gave up drinking.

* * *

Neither of their desired proposals passed. On top of that, Draco's father took a turn for the worst.

Lucius Malfoy had been subject to a host of curses in recent years. That and losing the use of his wand for an extended period had drained him. It was a recent study, one that was actually headed by none other than Hermione Granger, discussing the gradual symbiotic relationship between a wizard and his wand. Losing one's wand for an extended period was hard on the health, especially if the wizard was not given a magical outlet of some kind. The lack of a replacement for the wand would gradually eat away at a wizard until he imploded with the internal strain of keeping the magic leashed. Of course, Hermione was the one to push this study through the committees in order to make them see that taking away a prisoner's wand rather than setting limitations was actually cruel and unnatural punishment.

A pity it was too late for Lucius Malfoy.

Draco watched as the healers bustled about inside the room. His mother had a death grip on his hand and she was already sobbing uncontrollably. He felt numb with shock. He had lost a majority of his former respect for his father in the last war, but this was still his father. This was still the man who taught him how to fly, how to cast his first spell with a wand, who traveled up to Hogwarts at regular intervals to make sure he was studying as he should. He had been the world's most controlling father, a man who cared almost fanatically about appearances, but one who had acted as a buffer between him and danger as long as Draco remembered. He was not even fifty, in a world where wizards lived to two hundred on a good day.

Beside him, his mother took a long, deep breath to control herself and turned her face onto his shoulder. Draco watched as the healers shook their heads to one another. A Ministry official in the corner of the room marked down something on his paper and turned to exit the room. The healers nodded to one another and raised their wands to begin the preservation process for the funeral rites.

"Mrs. Malfoy, Mr. Malfoy."

Draco realised he was being addressed and squeezed his mother on the arm, giving her time to get herself under control.

"Officer Bugleweed," Draco said, and stopped as a figure came hurtling down the hall.

"Stop! Mr. Bugleweed! I have the Wizengamot's approved decision to remove the prisoner to his home—" Hermione was saying breathlessly and loudly.

"It's too late, Miss Granger," Bugleweed said, turning around to fix the harried woman with a stern glare over his spectacles.

Hermione stumbled to a halt. "What?" Her question was a breath of air as her wide eyes went to Draco before flying to Narcissa's face.

"Lucius Malfoy passed away at twenty past six o'clock on the third of August, 2000. There will no longer be any need for prisoner liaison services, Miss Granger." Turning to the Malfoys, the older official said, "The Ministry is sorry for your loss. Please report to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement tomorrow to retrieve the departed's items."

Draco could only be glad that Bugleweed refrained from dancing a jig when uttering his words.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Bugleweed," Hermione said, her eyes flashing angrily. "Closing out prisoner files still falls under the purview of the OSBP Committee."

Next to him, Narcissa was shivering. "Draco, I need to leave," she said in a low voice. In seconds, Blippy, their house-elf appeared. At his nod, Narcissa disappeared with the elf.

"You're welcome to close out the case, Miss Granger," the official said, his stern face looking not any less friendly. "Good day."

Hermione turned to him. Her fingers flexed at her side. "Draco—I'm…"

Holding up a hand to forestall her, Draco found his throat completely closed up. After a tense moment in which he thought he'd burst into tears right then and there, he finally shook his head at her and turned to walk towards the Floo.

As he passed her, she suddenly reached out to grab hold of his arm and turned on her heel.

In the next moment, they were gone from the hospital. They had Apparated behind some trees, and she led the way towards a paved walkway next to a lake of some kind. It was a lovely summer evening, the temperatures having dropped after the rain that afternoon. People milled around them, laughing and chatting, walking hand in hand, jogging.

Life was going on for everyone except Lucius Malfoy.

It suddenly hit him hard.

Concentrating on not throwing up helped. Suddenly, he was putting all his efforts into breathing through his mouth. His father and the medicinal smell of the sickroom seemed very far away amidst the smell of grass and water.

"I'm sorry—this is Hyde Park. It's a bit crowded. Do you—should we go somewhere else? I know you've never been in Muggle London."

Draco registered that she sounded worried. "Why?" The question came out of its own accord. "Why do you care about us?" He gazed at her impassively, at her hair that had come loose from the bun at the nape of her neck. A lifetime ago, her hair had always been down, a messy frizzy disaster that he had mocked endlessly. Now that her hair was always up and neat, he found that he missed that version of her.

She exhaled sharply. "Why?" She shook her head a little, at a loss for words. "I don't—I mean, I care about a lot of people. It's my job to care."

He made a faint sound of disbelief, or perhaps it was bottled up hurt. She was indeed doing her job, and perhaps she tried this hard with every single case handed to her. The heavens only knew how she didn't collapse under the weight of so much care . When had he started to feel this way, that the reason why he received special care mattered, especially from her? This wasn't how his life was meant to go, and now there was a pit of unhappiness heavy as a rock in his stomach.

At the edge of his vision, something fluttered. She still clutched the newly-signed Wizengamot decree/parchment thing in her hand, evidence of how hard she had been fighting for his family, although it would never be of use now. She looked a little beleaguered and possibly conflicted as she searched for the right words to say. "Well, and we're...friendly now, right? That's what friends do. I mean—I thought we were sort of friends. Sometimes." This last was spoken in a sort of irritated mutter, as though she found it awkward to express what she really meant.

He scoffed then and gave her a look of pure disbelief. "Yes, but my father—" He found his throat catching on the word and he had to clear his throat a few times before he could make it past that horrible sensation. "You helped my father. He did some—really terrible things, according to the law." The last word was uttered with tones of derision and irony. It was such a malleable concept, laws. This time, it had caught the Malfoys at a weak point, and down they went.

He found his teeth grinding down and his fist clenching. It was difficult to know what exactly he expected from her just now. Wasn't it enough that she had tried to help them? Why did it matter just why she did it? Why did it matter that it was Hermione Granger and not any of the rest of the Malfoys' numerous former allies and friends, all of whom had gone the way of the wind?

More importantly, why should it matter that she had helped his father versus helping him? Did the difference even matter to her?

She hesitated before speaking. "He was still your father."

He didn't even look up when he spoke, this time at a volume that was barely audible. "I've done bad things."

Draco wasn't sure what he expected her to do or say. Sweep it under the carpet. Pat him on the arm and change the subject. Leave him to mope by himself out in the open with a world full of Muggles. The group that had the most to fear from the former him. He almost laughed aloud at that.

"You speak as though you have the monopoly on regret," she said. "You don't. I—we've all done things we regret."

He snorted. "You have?"

"Yes," she said, and her tone was definitive and defiant. "Me. You don't have the monopoly on regret, you know, much as you may want to play it like that. For example, I could have—done more on your father's case. Instead, I let old grudges make me drag my feet." She heaved a sigh as she looked again at the paper in her hand before rolling it up, though her expression indicated she would rather tear it up where she stood.

"He was your father," Hermione said, carefully opening her bag and sliding the scroll inside. "I didn't start out being his advocate. I wanted him to pay for what he did. But then, I realised that there was one thing I couldn't begrudge him for—how much he cared about his family. He threw his own life away to spare yours and your mother's. That's something—" Her voice hitched. "That's something I understand myself. You—you've done things you've regretted, just as I have. Yes, I thought we were on opposite sides, but really, when it came down to it, we were all just there for our families."

He lifted his head then to look at her, really look at her. All this time, he had been submersed in his own fugue state. He hadn't even considered what it was like to be her, to have practically no family other than her motley group of friends—

"You've—lost a lot of people too," he said, feeling awkward and guilty for the first time in her presence, for something other than the shame of being in public.

When she nodded and looked away, it really hit him then, how far apart they were and how far they had come from who they were to be able to stand here and share moments like this.

"How can you be kind to someone who's done what I've done?" he asked, genuinely puzzled. "How can you offer loyalty to someone like me?" Wasn't she showing an indiscriminate amount of disloyalty to her friends, the ones he used to pick on, the people he had tried to harm, even if he hadn't been able to in the end? That was what alliances were all about—a certain amount of fealty.

He had sought to make alliances early—it was a pact with him sealed with everything but blood. Friendship was only a weaker version of the alliances that he, and all Malfoys, believed in. Even as he thought that, it occurred to him that this concept, like all others in his life, had been wrong somehow.

"It's not just about loyalty, you know. Friendship, true friendship, is about doing what's right. That outweighs loyalty by a mile. You can't just blindly follow where the other leads. It takes a true friend to stand up to you, to tell you what you don't want to hear. Granted, my definition of friendship is probably not very popular." She gave a short little laugh.

He stared at the river for a very long time. Petrichor emanated from the grass all around them, the very last residue of the torrential rain in the past few weeks. Hordes of people had emerged from shelter to enjoy the first breath of fresh air, like animals creeping from their caves. Weak lines of reddish-yellow light sought to break through the heavy clumps of clouds. The sound of cheerful chatter rose and fell, swallowed up by the sounds of nature coming out in all its force.

Friendship versus loyalty. Dumbledore—that miserable old mule who wouldn't listen to him right up to the end—had said something of the sort at the end of his first year. Longbottom had gotten House points for standing up to his friends—something about "bravery to stand up to your friends." Draco had wanted to disregard that as Gryffindor hogwash at the time, bitter with disappointment over the loss of the House Cup.

"I don't care what other people say, Draco," she said. "I can be your friend too. I couldn't be your friend if I didn't see what I do see in you—that you're not the same person you were. And maybe you always were meant to be someone different but couldn't, because of the way you were raised or for whatever reason." Her voice slowed, lowered. "That's what I see when I see you. Someone who tried to be someone evil and failed. It's really hard to still hate someone after that."

Draco wanted to believe that was true. He had been laboring under the misconception that he had been weak; that had it not been for him and the incalculable errors he had made, his father would not be dead today. It would have been a terrible outcome if the Dark Lord had won, one that he hadn't fancied at all, but it had been the team he had signed up to play for.

Everything had started to collapse on the makeshift life he had constructed for himself when his father was sentenced for the first time. Then, after the war, when he had tried to make sense of his father's actions and his own, they started to appear increasingly ill-informed and misaligned. It seemed that no matter what, Draco was either doomed to be either weak or wrong. Neither was palatable to his own sense of self-worth.

Worse, for all his misgivings, it had seemed impossible for him to find a place in this new society. He had trembled at the thought of venturing beyond this small group of people, the society who went through the war and its atrocities. If he couldn't find absolution here, where would he find it?

But here was Hermione Granger—someone who had genuine reasons to despise him for everything he used to represent and everything he did based on those beliefs—offering forgiveness. Understanding. Redemption. Friendship. Just on the basis of something new she thought she saw in him. She didn't think it was weak of him to have failed under his father's edicts, or wrong of him to have to realign his whole belief system.

She spoke of friendship being built on something other than blind loyalty—these were all concepts that were foreign and not altogether unwelcome to him. He couldn't help but grasp at these new ideas like a sinking man for a rope to shore. Had he thought of things like she did a decade ago, perhaps his life would have panned out very differently.

"Can we?" he asked, and it was a genuine question. "Can we really be friends?"

She had a little frown on her forehead and she wasn't looking at him at all. "It's not like I don't know where you were coming from or who you were. In a way, perhaps if the war didn't happen, nothing would be different. But it did happen, and neither you nor I are the same people we were. Perhaps we would have remained on opposing sides, but things change. And now I see that we weren't so different after all in the choices we made for the people we were trying to protect."

He felt almost embarrassed and humbled by her defense of his actions. "It's too bad you weren't my defense lawyer," he said. "I could have used you."

"This is what friendship is," she said, shrugging a little as though she had discomfited herself with her long speech. "Trying to understand each other. Finding ways to heal together. Correcting one another when one goes wrong. Although, of course, that last part doesn't always make you popular."

There was a certain truth to what she said. It was also the second time she had spoken of the right things being the unpopular choice. Draco thought he was rather done doing the popular thing. He had a weak moral compass that was led easily astray by thoughts of glory and gold. Hermione Granger, it seemed, had a moral compass pointed unerringly north. Funny, he had never thought of himself as someone needing a guiding hand, but maybe that was something that also needed to change as well.

They stood staring out at the water for a long moment without speaking. He let the summer breeze waft over him and smelled the scent of freshly cut grass and water and flowers and wildlife. The sky had stopped being grey. A brilliant wash of oranges and pale pinks with streaks of red now illuminated the rays of the setting sun.

"I've never seen the sky so red," he said suddenly.

"'Red sky at night, sailors' delight; red sky in the morning, sailors take warning,'" she quoted, a small smile on her lips as she contemplated the view. "There'll be fair weather tomorrow morning. A bright new day."

"Is that some sort of charm?" he asked, feeling bemused.

"It's an old sailors' superstition, but it's proven to be true. Weather systems and all that."

As he watched the sky ripple with an infinite variation of crimson shades, he felt his chest loosen as though the band around his ribcage that had been slowly tightening over the past few years gave and broke. He could breathe again; really, truly breathe. The air was filled with the scent of newness and fresh earth and clean grass.

She really knew the strangest things, and somehow, somewhere along the way, he had fallen into the habit of trusting her. For the first time in over three years, he was actually looking forward to a brand new day, as long as she was there too.


End file.
